The output from the automated system required twice as many human hours to clean up. But the experiment also showed that cleaning up errors takes only a small fraction of the time required for the initial human translation. Thus, even with slightly sloppier first drafts, replacing the initial translator with a machine cuts the total human-hours of paid work in half.

This does not sound good! I would certainly resent downgrading from translator to proofreader of machine-translated texts...

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Dyran AltenburgUnited States Local time: 00:29 English to Spanish + ...

Silver Lining

Dec 1, 2006

Jabberwock wrote:
This does not sound good! I would certainly resent downgrading from translator to proofreader of machine-translated texts...

You could always upgrade to writer of the carefully crafted source texts that will be run through those machines.

--
Dyran

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Thank you for the article. I must say that the "Meaningful Machines" sound ominous.

That being said, I have already been hired as the proofreader for a machine translation (I didn't accept the job knowing that this was the case). A proofread is cheaper than a real translation, that was the client's reasoning. Except that it took me longer to make sense of it than if I'd been simply translating. It wasn't a lasting collaboration, I can tell you.

On a lighter note, I just wanted to mention that the title of the article is a play on words of the book "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris, which I heartily recommend.

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